I wonder how accurate the production rumor really is? When you consider the scale of Amazon’s worldwide operations, a supply of only 20 thousand components is effectively the same as not producing any Kindles at all. That 20,000 is barely enough to repair returned units, so unless Amazon is in the habit of sinking money into excess stock this rumor suggests that they’re going to stop making Kindles for at least part of 2013.How long will Amazon stop? That’s another question, and that depends on whether they have actually stopped producing Kindles. I have a sneaking suspicion that Amazon is planning to start producing Kindles with Liquavista screens.

PLASTERED on the wall of San Francisco’s main public library are 50,000 index cards, formerly entries in the library’s catalogue. The tomes they refer to may be becoming decorative, too. Not only can library patrons now search the collection online, they may also check out electronic books without visiting the library. For librarians, “e-lending” is a natural offer in the digital age. Publishers and booksellers fear it could unbind their business.Worries about the effect of libraries on the book trade are not new. But digital devices, which allow books to reach readers with ease and speed, intensify them. As Brian Napack, president of Macmillan, a big publisher, put it in 2011, the fear is that someone who gets a library card will “never have to buy a book again”.

Most readers, I think, will by now have seen the "Medieval Helpdesk" sketch from Norweigan TV, where an exasperated monk requires assistance to start working with a new-fangled and daunting "book". It's fun – if loopily anachronistic, the codex having been around since the 1st century AD. But it does rest on a presumption that I'm increasingly beginning to question: that technological changes to the way we read affect only the secondary, cosmetic and non-essential aspects of reading. There is a kind of bookish dualism at work. The text is the soul, and the book – or scroll, or vellum, or clay tablet or knotted rope in the case of quipu – is the perishable body. In this way of thinking, the ebook is the book, only unshackled from paper, ink and stitching. If the debate about the ebook is to move on from nostalgic raptures over smell and rampant gadget-fetishism, it's time to think about the real fundamentals.

The heart of DMP, though, is its website, eManga. It started out as a streaming site on which you could buy points to “rent” or “buy” manga. A rental lasted for 48 hours, while buying gave the user unlimited access–as long as he or she was online. There were no downloads.Over the years, DMP revised the website several times, eliminating the rental, adding other publishers (some of whom have since disappeared) and finally, late last year, allowing readers to download their manga. In typical DMP fashion, they offer seven different formats, which are readable on a wide variety of different devices.I asked production associate Amy Koga, who helped develop the site, about some of the changes.

Amazon announced today that they had bought another book-focused social network, Goodreads.This 16 million member strong community is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2007 by Otis Chandler. It’s built on the idea of encouraging members to create bookshelves of titles they’ve read, would like to read, and so on. Readers can rate books, write reviews, and discuss the details of the titles they liked.It’s not clear yet exactly why Amazon bought Goodreads, but the most obvious reason would be the Goodreads Recommendation Engine. Goodreads has been building this engine since well, since it launched, but they doubled down on their efforts in 2011 with the acquisition of Discovereads.com. That site was integrated into Goodreads and ever since then has been the basis for the Goodreads Recommendation Engine.

E Ink Holdings has been developing e-paper displays since 2009, which are found in most modern electronic readers. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Sony all feature the high-resolution displays in their current generation lineups. Recently, CEO of E Ink Scott Liu has resigned as the Chairman and CEO of E Ink and Vice Chairman Felix Ho has been named interim Chairman and CEO. With the shift in management and declining revenues, what does the future of E Ink hold?We caught up with the head of research and development Giovanni Mancini about what exactly is going on with the company. Whenever there is a shift in the top levels of management, it is often an indication that things are about to be shaken up.

“I know some see the advent of digital as a threat to the sector. But for me the biggest risk is that we fail to take advantage of new possibilities,” she said in an article in The Inquirer out of London.“Unless we embrace the future, the sector will for sure fall behind, overtaken by more forward-looking and dynamic parts of the world; overtaken by those who can look ahead and grasp the future. Then we will let down our economy, our people, and our cultural heritage.”

Sony and Kobo are in big trouble with their current business model of selling hardware and ebooks. The lack of meaningful content and acquisitions are making these two lag behind the competition. It is not enough anymore to merely offer ebooks as a way to gain customer loyalty and trust, these two companies have virtually no community and are trailing off on content discovery. Today, we will look at the reasons why in the next few years these and Barnes and Noble may be fade away into irrelevance.Last week Amazon acquired the book community site “GoodReads.” Many people in the industry claim that the sale was for $180 million dollars in cash and incentives to meet specific goals. Earlier in the year, Amazon also bought Voice recognition system Ivona. Amazon also purchased AbeBooks, a vendor of rare and used books from independent publishers in 2008. As part of that acquisition Amazon also got a stake in Shelfari’s competitor LibraryThing, which AbeBooks had previously purchased a 40% stake in. Amazon ended up using both of these companies technologies in their X-Ray for ebooks feature that is evident in their entire line of e-readers and tablets. Also, don’t forget Audible.

So Amazon has just bought the ecosystem where many of America's most influential readers choose their books. How exactly they'll use it isn't entirely clear yet. Some have suggested they'll integrate Goodreads into the Kindle experience. Others think that, given the problems Amazon has had with writers buying friendly reviews, they might use the site as an a big cache of trustworthy opinions. As David Vinjamuri put it at Forbes, "Goodreads offers Amazon the ability to transmit the recommendations of prolific readers to the average reader." In any event, there's plenty of value for Amazon to unlock. Assuming, of course, they don't do anything to muck up their new purchase.

The Digital Public Library of America, to be launched on April 18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge. How is that possible? In order to answer that question, I would like to describe the first steps and immediate future of the DPLA. But before going into detail, I think it important to stand back and take a broad view of how such an ambitious undertaking fits into the development of what we commonly call an information society.

The legacy of PDF is evident later in the document where we read that 73% of publishers responding to an SPi Global survey say they're distributing in Adobe's format while only 60-64% are distributing in mobi or EPUB formats. So there are still a number of publishers who are in the ebook marketplace with PDFs only, obviously missing out on the largest retail opportunities at Amazon, Google, B&N, Kobo, etc.

As television moderator Michael Hametner noted in a segment on the book fair, “Demonization of the ebook is dying out.” (Its more justified, if equally manichean counterpart, demonization of Amazon, is alive and well.) For years, German publishers have kept ebooks marginalized by pricing them so high that there was no incentive to buy them. So while there was much talk about digitization, ebooks were, well just not important in reality, for readers. That moment has passed, with a spate of recent articles to the tune of “no really, we mean it, this time the digital shift is really here,” as confirmation.

Multi-function tablets have become consumers' preferred e-reading devices, overtaking dedicated e-readers for the first time, according to the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)'s closely watched Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey, an ongoing study powered by Bowker Market Research. Results from the first installment in Volume Four of the survey show 44 percent of e-book readers prefer a tablet, up from 37 percent in the August 2012 survey. During the same period, respondents' choice of a dedicated e-reader fell from 49 percent to 42 percent. The study suggests the trend will continue as respondents' intent to purchase a dedicated e-reader has dropped, while intent to purchase has remained consistent for tablets, at about 37 percent.

So, RIP the Agency Model. You won’t be missed. What is simply staggering is that publishers thought they could rewrite the laws of capitalism by trying to set the price of a product that they were not actually selling.The fact that it has happened in the same week that Amazon has bought Goodreads adds to the sense of unease. It is almost impossible not to feel that in one corner we have an all conquering behemoth inexorably crunching the bones of its enemies and in the other corner we have err, publishers.

Doubleday reported more than 500,000 readers took advantage of the free e-book download of The Da Vinci Code which included an excerpt from Dan Brown’s forthcoming thriller Inferno (on sale May 14th). The e-book offering, in celebration of the book’s 10th anniversary, was available to readers through all digital retailers for seven days. Coincidental with the e-book promotion, booksellers received a special slip-cased hardcover anniversary edition of the book with a thank you note from Dan Brown.

Just six months after forging a partnership with the American Booksellers Association (ABA) to help independent bookstores sell ebooks, Canadian upstart Kobo has shown that it can crush the competition – even when the competition is one of the world’s largest and most admired companies.In fact, it only took a month.According to the ABA, Kobo has helped indies sell more ebooks in its first month working with them late last year than Google did in more than two years in a similar partnership.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the April 14, 2013 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending March 30, 2013.